Tigers and Cages

In her review in the magazine this week of Amy Chua’s shock-chronicle of strict and punitive parenting, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Elizabeth Kolbert touches on some of the implicit geopolitical roots of the book’s popularity:

How is it that the richest country in the world can’t teach kids to read or to multiply fractions? Taken as a parable, Chua’s cartoonish narrative about browbeating her daughters acquires a certain disquieting force. Americans have been told always to encourage their kids. This, the theory goes, will improve their self-esteem, and this, in turn, will help them learn.

After a generation or so of applying this theory, we have the results. Just about the only category in which American students outperform the competition is self-regard.

But there’s another political aspect to the story, relating less to the book’s appeal to liberal parents than to its implications for the book’s actual subjects, children who bear the force of Chua’s brutal methods: namely, the likelihood that authoritarian parents create authoritarian children—children who are willing to endure, endorse, and inflict harsh rule.

Here’s Chua—who claims to have been reared by her parents in the same way that she reared her own—as cited in the review, regarding her time at Harvard Law School:

I didn’t care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me. I also wasn’t naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.

Not caring about the rights of criminals and not questioning authority is precisely the way plenty of governments around the world want their citizens to be—and indeed their citizens’ ingrained passivity is one of the things that allows those governments to get away with persecuting, as criminals, those who question governmental authority. I’m absolutely not suggesting that Chua’s problems have anything to do with her Chinese heritage—dictators and would-be dictators can be found among all ethnicities—but am suggesting, rather, that wherever dictators hold sway, it’s worth considering the prevalence of repressive (even if well-meaning) parenting (though, when all factors are considered, it may be hard to know which is chicken and which, egg). Or, to put it another way: who among Chua’s readers has seen “The White Ribbon”?

P.S. I don’t think that “The White Ribbon” is, aesthetically, a very good movie, in part because it’s a movie in the op-ed mode, in which the director, Michael Haneke, doesn’t so much raise the question of the political results of authoritarian child-rearing as to assert the answer. But at least the answer he gives is correct.

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